Solidarity 409, 15 June 2016

The state and Pride

The LGBT+ movement has made enormous strides in Britain in the last thirty years. It’s a huge achievement for us and I don’t wish to downplay the massive change in social attitudes and laws that our comrades have fought for and won. Having said that, it seems that we have an increasingly short memory about how we got here and who our friends are. The massive changes have come about because of the bravery of our forerunners and older LGBT+ people, not because people suddenly “saw sense” or because “love wins”. Without them, we would still be criminalised and we would still be getting beaten up...

Why Blair is the guy whose face is on the placard

Richard Nixon famously told a press conference that he was “not a crook”. And in the sense that the late US president was never found guilty of anything whatsoever, the statement is factually incontestable. Likewise, Tony Blair is not a war criminal, even though contention to the contrary is a longstanding commonplace among anti-war campaigners, repeated endlessly on social media to this day. Britain’s former prime minister finds the very suggestion deeply offensive, as one supposes anyone might. He genuinely cannot see why he has ended up as the guy whose face is on the placard, as he put it...

Concessions on the “Snooper’s Charter”

Home Secretary Theresa May has made concessions on the so-called ″snooper′s charter″. An amended version of the Bill, passed through the House of Commons on 6 June, still gives the government, police, and security services unprecedented powers to invade the privacy of ordinary citizens without warrant, regardless of whether or not they are accused of committing any crime. The Bill also brings in powers to compel communication companies to cooperate in investigations, and to store and hand over records. The Bill contains sanctions against whistleblowers and gagging orders that prevent public...

The shaming of Sports Direct boss

Mike Ashley, the Chief Executive of Sports Direct, has admitted to paying workers less than minimum wage. The admission came while he was being questioned by MPs on the Business, Innovation and Skills House of Commons select committee. He recognised that for a ″specific time″ workers were effectively paid less than minimum wage due to the practice of keeping workers after their shift to be searched before they were allowed to leave. He is now saying he will pay back pay to those workers effected. This is a huge win for an energetic campaign by the union Unite and others, and campaign which...

Lewisham fights academisation... again

Last year, teachers, students and parents in Lewisham ran a campaign that successfully fought off the threat of academisation to four schools in the borough. Activists were confident that this left them in a good position to launch a vibrant campaign against the government’s proposals for forced-academisation contained in the recent White Paper, Educational Excellence Everywhere. Just as this campaign was starting to gain some momentum it became clear that we faced a more immediate and local threat. In December 2015, Sir Steve Bullock, the directly elected mayor of Lewisham set up an Education...

Anti-racists rally in Tel Aviv

Thousands of people participated in a demonstration in Tel Aviv on Saturday 28 May, protesting at the appointment of the far-right Avigdor Lieberman as Defence Minister. Demonstrators chanted “Lieberman is a racist and a fascist”, and “Lieberman is the minister of war”. Placards proclaimed “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies”, and “Israel, Palestine, two states for two peoples”. The demonstration was organised by Meretz, a left-wing political party, the Peace Now coalition, and the Joint List, a coalition of Arab parties. Meretz leader Zehava Galon said “only a joint Jewish-Arab effort can...

French strikers defy bosses

Lutte Ouvrière (editorial 12 June) The government, the bosses and the media ... have used the victims of the floods as part of their grotesque moral blackmail [in a fight over France’s new labour laws]. They used Euro 2016 to demand that the strikes stop. And, in spite of everything, the SNCF [French rail] strike is carrying on, the refuse workers are sticking to their guns, and Air France pilots have carried out their threat to strike. They are right to do so. Are the government and the bosses observing a truce in their offensive against the workers? Clearly not — so why should the workers...

Greater Manchester mayor — doubly undemocratic

The selection of a Labour candidate for mayor of the Greater Manchester region is under way. Elected mayors were part of the deal between George Osborne and the ten leaders of the Greater Manchester councils for devolution, despite the lack of any democratic mandate for the plan as a whole, and particularly the control of those devolved powers by a mayor. (An elected mayor was overwhelmingly rejected in a referendum in Manchester in 2012.) The Labour procedures for selection of a candidate for the election in May 2017 have been equally top down. The National Executive has drawn up rules which...

Appeal from Shahrokh Zamani Action Committee

The Shahrokh Zamani Action Committee is calling on union branches to discuss the following motion: This union branch notes that: ∙ The July 2015 nuclear deal between the Iranian regime and the US and European governments has opened up trade and diplomatic relations. ∙There are now many international organisations like the World Bank, IMF and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) advising the Iranian regime on modernising its methods of exploiting waged labour. ∙So far there has been no ‘peace dividend’ for Iranian workers, economically or otherwise; as shown by the flogging of 17 gold...

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